Paul Harding - Enon

When I came to the creek that ran from Enon Swamp to the lake, I stopped and filled the backpack I had brought with me with as many stones as I could shoulder. I walked through the woods to Cedar Street, crossed the street, and marched through more woods to Enon Lake.

The night was moonless and lidded with clouds so thick that they were invisible within the darkness they made. The clouds seemed low enough that I had to hunch down not to crack my head on them. My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself and consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. Mrs. Hale is right, but I cannot stomach it. My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that’s what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him , in a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it’s a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.

But that was only how I’d felt since Kate died. I felt as if it was always true and that I was merely deluded before, that I believed in, was enchanted by, a lie of love and goodness, simply because I had it so good for a time. But it was not a lie while I lived it. It was true. It was as true as my despair after her death. I would never have called myself an optimist, or even happy in the sense of being satisfied. I was always restless and ill at ease, running too hot. But Kate gave my life joy. I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.

I WALKED INTO ENON Lake with the intention of drowning myself. My idea was to sink myself with the rocks in the backpack. The water was cold and pure and clean. It washed my filthy hands and my filthy face and my filthy hair. I was exhausted and scorched and the water quenched me. I could practically hear the water hiss as I immersed myself in it. I unshouldered the backpack full of rocks and it sank behind me. I waded out until I was up to my neck. My clothes weighed me down but I still had to half-tread with my arms and hands. I exhaled the air in my lungs. I ducked under the surface and sank into the cold quiet water.

There had been so many times when I had felt embarrassed for my daughter that I was her father, mostly times when, after I’d been fired by a client or had failed to make enough money to last the winter without having to dip into the money from selling my mother’s house, Kate would hug me and kiss me and tell me, “It’s okay, Dad,” and I’d have to act comforted by her while being overwhelmed by what a wonderful kid she was and how humiliated I felt at having put her in the position of consoling her own parent. I realized that what I had been doing since Kate’s death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her and dispatching her from her self and from this world, and my perversity — that was the word for it, I realized in that instant, under the cold water — my perversity was perfected by the fact that I knew better, that I had known all along that the drugs and punching the wall and breaking my hand, on purpose, of course, of course, of course , I thought — and ravaging my family’s home and digging around in the dark and ruining the peace of other people’s homes and terrorizing them was the deliberate cultivation of the violence of the instant of the collision of the car with my girl and, worse, the deliberate, angry sowing of it on neighbors and strangers and worst of all Kate, whatever that name now meant — memory, angel, voodoo doll. And yet I knew better. I had known every second of every day that what I was doing was wrong and I had done it anyway.

The water’s mercies were brief. My breath gave out. The foreign, submarine world suddenly alarmed me. I surfaced and gulped at the air and scrambled back toward the shore, reaching the edge of the water on my hands and knees. When I attempted to stand, I tottered under the weight of my soaked clothes and sprawled on my back, my legs still in the shallows. I unzipped my sweatshirt and peeled out of it like I was shedding a bloated second skin. Exhaustion overtook me and I lay panting and freezing on the sandy gravel. The last tatters of storm clouds streamed across the bright summer stars. I barked a laugh.

“Mercy, mercy me; this is sad ,” I gasped. “Enough is enough is right. Charles Washington Crosby, you have got to get your shit together.” I would have curled up and fallen asleep where I lay if I hadn’t been so cold and dismayed with myself. Instead, I got to my feet and started back toward home, dragging my heavy, limp sweatshirt by the hood over the ground behind me.

When I had crossed the golf course and reached the top of the hill behind the cemetery, I paused and looked down at the irregular ranks of headstones. From where I stood, Kate’s stone was obscured behind the maple tree. No matter, I thought, glancing at my dark, dirty sweatshirt. I look like an old ghoul dragging around some fawn I snatched from its mother’s bed. I’ll get some dry clothes and some sleep and come back tomorrow.

Directly in front of me, halfway down the hill, maybe seventy-five yards away, a spark of light flashed and backlit two or three large rectangular headstones, so quickly that had the afterimage not pulsed its way across my vision, I’d have been convinced that it hadn’t happened. I squinted at the dark. The light sparked again, and again, and blinked into a tiny flame. A young girl’s voice laughed and another shushed at it. I realized it was the two girls I had seen drinking wine and reading tarot cards and talking about boys. I could just make out a cigarette and a face in the light for a second before the lighter went out again. One of the girls laughed again and the other tried to hiss her quiet but started laughing, too. They hushed each other but I could still hear them talking in delighted, hurried undertones and it was charming, how happy they sounded to be together, raising a little hell, acting up a little. I thought about the nights when Peter Lord and other friends and I used to range all over Enon, not really even a little truly feral after all, maybe, but boisterous and happy. And I thought about what fun I’d had with Kate hiking all over the village, too, and how when she’d been younger, how thrilling it had been for her whenever we’d wandered off a bit too far and had had to walk home in the dark.